I recall standing with a one-term Ontario New Democratic MPP on Pine Street in Burlington. It is a beautiful spring day in 1995. A newly built non-profit housing project, Wellington Terrace, was celebrating its grand opening. Balloons, refreshments and there is a ribbon is ready to be cut.
“You know if we aren’t reelected there will be no more places like this built,” he told me.
No more built, I thought. While I was sympathetic to his perspective, the view seemed more self-serving hyperbole than realistic forecast.
But the MPP was right. You know the story.
Following World War II the federal government jumped into the housing field in a big way. Polices were slanted towards home ownership. While social housing and creation of rental housing weren’t high priorities, there were some initiatives.
Major cuts to government funding for social housing began in 1984. The Brian Mulroney government slashed national affordable housing spending by almost $2 billion. In 1993, Mulroney’s successor, Kim Campbell, cancelled all new funding for affordable housing.
Then things worsened with Paul Martin’s 1995 budget. 
Paul Martin
On February 27 that year, Martin put on his budget boots and kicked responsibility for social housing down to the provinces. He cancelled all spending on new social housing projects. The Finance Minister hung his hat on many of the popular clichés of the day calling for “hard choices” and “real change,” “smaller and smarter government,” bucking the status quo and “simple common sense.”
The rhetoric mattered not at all to those who were struggling to find housing that was safe and affordable. What really mattered, as we have discovered, was that Canada now had no housing strategy; the only developed country without such a plan.
Back to that spring day in 1995: As I enjoyed the opening of one of the last non-profit housing communities built in Ontario, we were just months away from more cuts from the new Mike Harris government. Their idea of common sense (in fact, they called it a revolution) included the cancellation of 17,000 units of co-op and non-profit housing that had been approved but not completed.
